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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in ministry with Dr. Kristin Ferguson, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Services at Gateway Seminary. They explore how AI can be effectively utilized in local church ministry, education, and sermon preparation. The conversation provides practical examples of AI applications in ministry contexts while emphasizing the importance of critical thinking and biblical evaluation.
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Welcome to the lead on podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues and applications of ministry leadership. On this podcast, we talk about the daily work of ministry, and that's what we're going to do today. And I hope to illustrate at the beginning an important principle of effective leadership, and that is when you don't know what you're talking about, stop talking and get someone who does know what they're talking about to come in and help you. So today on the podcast, we're doing something a little different, and that is I'm going to be interviewing a friend to talk with you about a very important issue that I know a little bit about, but frankly, not that much.
Jeff Iorg:And it's such an important issue that I wanna bring in an expert to help us understand how to use artificial intelligence most effectively to assist us in local church ministry. How do you use AI as a positive force for good in your local church or ministry responsibilities? Now in order to do this, I've invited my friend, doctor Kristin Ferguson, to be my guest today. Kristin is the vice president for enrollment and student services at Gateway Seminary. But before she did that, she was the director of online education for Gateway.
Jeff Iorg:She's written a book entitled Excellence in Online Education. And last semester, she delivered an academic convocation to the seminary on the use of artificial intelligence in education, and particularly in their case in the seminary community. So today, we're going to hear from a practitioner who's very much involved in ministry, who is herself the wife of a Southern Baptist pastor and who is herself vigorously engaged in ministry in her local church. She's gonna talk today with us about what it means to use artificial intelligence in the best way possible to strengthen, guide, help, to augment the work we do in ministry. So, Kristen, thank you for being on the Lead On podcast today.
Kristin Ferguson:Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to chat with you and have a good conversation.
Jeff Iorg:I really respect you on many levels, having worked with you for many years. What first motivated you to become interested in online education and then growing out of that in artificial intelligence?
Kristin Ferguson:Well, my first, full time job was in online education in our sister's seminary in Kentucky. And it was just a great experience for me to contribute and use what I was learning in seminary to help other people, fine tune their curriculum and become really excellent delivering online education. And so that piqued my interest. And then my doctoral studies focused on helping faculty do online education very well, and that's what led me to Gateway. And you've given me the opportunity to kind of grow a lot in that and believed in me, encouraged me, and that's led me to begin to investigate on, artificial intelligence and how we can, use it well, but also ways that we need to avoid using it for the mission.
Jeff Iorg:Well, let's just start with something that might seem so basic, but frankly, may not be fully understood. What is AI or what is artificial intelligence? Is this like a a chip that gets planted in your brain or is this like a a sweetener that you stir into a drink? I mean, it's it's artificial and then it's intelligence. I don't think it's either of those things, but what is artificial intelligence?
Kristin Ferguson:Well, that is a really important question. And it's good not to assume that we all know what we're talking about because AI is kind of the catchphrase of our day, and it's used all the time to refer to lots of different things. So it was actually coined in the fifties, in some important research that was going on to decide if machines could use language to solve complex problems. So basically, as the history of AI has developed, it refers to a computer or a machine that thinks or acts humanly. And these the markers of what that is have developed and advanced as technology advanced.
Kristin Ferguson:So at first it was just can can a machine do a complex math problem and then we're gonna call that artificial intelligence. But then later in like the nineties and again in like 2016, could a machine or could a computer beat someone at chess or an even more strategic game like the Chinese game Go? And when the computer beat like a world champion that was coined, that's artificial intelligence. They're more intelligent than a human. So in 2022 is when we really have what we're currently understanding as artificial intelligence.
Kristin Ferguson:And that's a generative language AI where you can have a conversation with a computer and it respond to you in ways that you can understand, give you outputs like images and videos and whole essays, that are understandable and it's more usable. So that's why it's kind of become much more popular now is because the average person can ask a question and get a response.
Jeff Iorg:I think that's perhaps what's making it so important that we understand it today, and that is it has become so accessible. AI or artificial intelligence is actually, if you will, the generic title, but there are brand names that are different products that are being produced by other by major computer companies and major software providers. And these softwares become tools, that you can use in pretty simple ways, actually. I remember the first time that I saw you make a presentation on this subject. You typed a one sentence prompt into an artificial intelligence, program.
Jeff Iorg:You typed it in live on the screen in a faculty meeting at Gateway Seminary. You hit return, and it immediately started writing an essay. You you'd asked for that essay to be written on a certain subject. I think you wanted it at a high school senior level or maybe a college freshman level, and this one page essay was written in front of our eyes as this machine, this software generated this paper. I remember sitting there thinking that and reflecting on this phrase, the world just moved, or the Earth just moved.
Jeff Iorg:I knew something big had just happened by just watching you do that. So artificial intelligence, you've described it for us. We know it's very accessible now, and we are using it extensively in lots of different places. I hear people say artificial intelligence will will change the way that your car operates. It will, impact your appliances in your home.
Jeff Iorg:It's going to change, of course, the way you do your work and you interface with your company, your responsibilities. But today, we're specifically talking about how artificial intelligence impacts ministry and particularly how it impacts education in the context of ministry. So how are people using artificial intelligence in education? And you can start with the seminary if you want, then we'll branch over into church type settings.
Kristin Ferguson:Yeah. Absolutely. So, well, I use AI every day. I use it every day for one thing or another as far as it concerns my job and my home and sometimes church. And, there are ways to use AI very strategically and well, but there's also, I think, principles that we need to really understand for Christian ethics to know how to not use AI.
Jeff Iorg:Okay. We're gonna come back to those. I'm gonna come back to those in a few minutes. But let's let's focus about how you're using it or how we can use it. Then I wanna talk about some concerns that we have along the way.
Kristin Ferguson:Great. Yeah. I'm using AI every day in the seminary. So I I ask AI about strategies for, marketing to certain groups. I use AI to think of strategies for distributing financial aid and gaining more enrollment.
Kristin Ferguson:We look at it when we talk about our educational practices and pedagogy. We look at, using AI as a conversation partner in some of our classes. For instance, you can say, to the, generative AI like Chachi, Petit, or Gemini, you can say pretend to be Jonathan Edwards as I talk with you, and then ask pretend Jonathan Edwards these questions and see what the responses are, and it's pulling from the dataset that it has. So, educationally, you can use it, in the classroom and it's and in administration.
Jeff Iorg:That's awesome. In fact, one of the demonstrations I saw you give us at the seminary was you asked a a program to write an essay, and then the essay was written on the screen. And then you said, the challenge of education though is that AI doesn't always get it right. It makes up information. It gets information wrong.
Jeff Iorg:It footnotes things incorrectly. And you said that one good way of using AI is to ask it to generate information that students then critique based on the data that they bring to the table as well. For example, what they've learned from reading that you've assigned, from their study of bible passages, or things like this. And so when you're asking AI for information or you're interfacing with it and having a dialogue as you've just described, you're not automatically assuming that everything it says is accurate, nor are you taking everything it says as, so to speak, gospel. But you are taking what it says as a prompt or something to motivate you or even something that you can challenge with information you may have from other sources.
Jeff Iorg:Am I summarizing this correctly? And if so, how would you describe it in maybe more even more detail?
Kristin Ferguson:Yeah. That's right. So, artificial intelligence is pulling from the dataset that it has access to. And it's gonna synthesize and summarize based on the prompt you write. So there are several variables at play when you get a response.
Kristin Ferguson:Did you ask the question or give the prompt accurately enough for it to pull the correct data from the sources that are more trustworthy and give you the response that you want? So there's a lot of art and science in the way that you ask the question, and then there's a lot of art and science in how you evaluate the response that's given to you, from that. So a good example actually is in my Sunday school class. My husband teaches the Sunday school class, and we have a brand new believer in that class. And he's getting his degree in computer science.
Kristin Ferguson:So he is all about AI right now. He loves it. He is always talking about things he's asking AI. And thankfully, he's not taking it as gospel truth and biblical accurate truth. He's bringing it to Sunday school.
Kristin Ferguson:And he's asking my husband, hey, Chachi Batee said this about the Bible. Is that true? Is that right? And then we'll kind of use that as a jumping off point to evaluate what does the Bible actually say about that versus what ChachiPT said about that. And you can do the same thing in our seminary classrooms is evaluating what could be common knowledge or even worldview specific information and evaluate to biblical truth.
Jeff Iorg:Well, this sort of leads us in then to the discussion of using AI in a ministry context, in a Sunday school class, in your small groups, maybe in sermon preparation, these kinds of things. You've referenced this one, new believer who's, using it or who's interfacing with it in the context you've just described. But what are some other ways that a person can use artificial intelligence effectively? You're a Sunday school teacher, pastor, small group leader. How could you do this more effectively?
Kristin Ferguson:Yeah. Well, I would say the first thing you can do is ask AI how to use this effectively. That is I I mean, sometimes you're like, I don't really know how to use this. Well, say I'm a 100 person church leader. You know, there's a 100 person people in my church.
Kristin Ferguson:We're in Southern California. We have a very diverse community. Here are our skills. We have a bunch of people in our church who speak different languages. Give me 10 ideas to reach out to my community knowing those demographics.
Kristin Ferguson:It will give you 10 ideas. You you can decide whether or not those are good ideas or whether you can actually do those ideas. But one way to use AI is to ask AI how it could be used to further your mission. That's awesome. Goes a that goes a lot into the prompt writing and giving it enough information.
Kristin Ferguson:Or you, you know, you can kind of drill it down even. Like I know right now is kind of budget planning season for many churches. That's another really great tool is to say, we typically get this much money. How what percentages should I divide this up into for outreach versus, you know, community church wide events or stratifying your budget in ways that maybe you hadn't thought of before? Also, it could be used for event planning.
Kristin Ferguson:You can say we have an event in 6 months. Can you break down a timeline of tasks for me to do to make sure I get this event in order? And it will give you a week by week or month by 1 month break down of what you need to do.
Jeff Iorg:That's awesome. Let's talk about it in terms of a Sunday school classroom. So you're in a classroom. You have a group of 13 year olds that are in your classroom, and you're talk teaching them the bible. They're they're accustomed to using AI in their classrooms at school.
Jeff Iorg:How would you use that in a Sunday school context to enhance what you're doing in teaching the bible?
Kristin Ferguson:Well, I am a big believer in active learning and making sure the classroom is not just a a lecture in the Sunday school class, but having dialogue and exploration. And I think this is a great opportunity is when a student, can explore on their own, they learn a lot. And so even giving the class a prompt or helping them come up with a prompt about a topic. So maybe we're exploring the concept of, social media and its effect on spirituality or its effect on our personal growth or our emotions. You can ask AI some of those things and then evaluate it together.
Kristin Ferguson:Is that true? Is that how you experience it? And then that kind of being the lead in to look at what Scripture says about those things. And it's a great opportunity to explore topics. And it also is a very quick reference to find other Bible passages that might be related to your topic.
Kristin Ferguson:So you can ask the class to look up on chat GPT other Bible passages pertaining to tithing or generosity, and it will give you a list. Whether or not the list is a 100% accurate or not is up to the class to investigate and decide on, but it kind of provides that easy access resource.
Jeff Iorg:One of the things that I think chat or artificial intelligence, Gemini, chat gpt, whatever you're using can do for us is give us a a, an opportunity for teaching critical thinking and teaching an interactive method of learning or of education. So, for example, a a good question might be, describe what, describe John the Baptist and why he is important. And so you get this essay back about John the Baptist and why he's important. Well, we're not suggesting that you ask, artificial intelligence program that question and take whatever it says as the answer. What we're suggesting is, alright.
Jeff Iorg:This is what the culture, this is what the prompts, this is what the programmers would want you to believe about John the Baptist. Now let's read these bible passages, and let's evaluate this essay. Let's let's grade the paper, so to speak. And so you're asking for information that creates generative conversation, but you're not replacing the need to teach people how to think critically using the bible as their source and using the bible to critique or to evaluate what artificial intelligence is telling us is true. Yeah.
Kristin Ferguson:I think a great way to put it is that it's not the source of truth. It's a conversation partner, to help us think and jog our mind and give us more information to consider. Another really important use that I think is very, very helpful is application. Saying something like, we've learned this principle and here's our community or here's our situation or our high school is this way. Give us 3 ways that we could potentially apply this this week.
Kristin Ferguson:And it'll come up with some fun ideas and maybe that's something that the group decides, hey, we're gonna choose number 2 and and do that this week and see how it goes.
Jeff Iorg:Right. Let's talk about in using artificial intelligence to help pastors with message development. For example, I think one good application of this would be asking for factual information. So for example, you're preaching through the old testament, you come across the name of a place that you don't know that much about. You could ask, what is this place?
Jeff Iorg:Tell me the background of this location. Tell me what this city was in bible times, and you will probably get a relatively accurate historical summary because it's going to draw from those kind of sources. It would not, however, tell you why that city is important in the biblical narrative, but it would tell you the factual data or information about about it as you then made your evaluative statements about how to use it. Another way, which you've already alluded to, is asking artificial intelligence to help you with application. Mhmm.
Jeff Iorg:So to say, for example, if you're preaching on, overcoming fear, you could ask, what are the most common fears of, 15 year old girls in America today? What are the most common fears of children under age 10 in America today? And artificial intelligence is going to go out to various sources, and it's going to list those for you and probably document those if you ask for that. And you're going to be able to say, oh, here are some articles. Here are some sources that tell me what people are afraid of and what I can tailor my application application toward.
Jeff Iorg:And even though you may not reference artificial intelligence in the sermon, you may be able to say, and as we understand that the Bible is teaching us how to overcome fear, this will confront your fears if you're afraid of this or if you're afraid of that. And because of this research that you've done, you have readily at hand something that's very applicable to the people who are going to be sitting right in front of you. And so I see it as having some pretty specific applications in historical information, in helping with specific application. But, again, we we both keep coming back to it doesn't do the evaluative work of helping to craft what does the bible really say about this subject, and you have to dig that out on your own. Yeah.
Kristin Ferguson:Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, if you ask AI to come up with a sermon on a text, it will do so for you. But you have skipped the most important part of creating a message is the personal transformation that happens to a preacher or to a speaker as they reflect on the word of God. That is the critical piece.
Kristin Ferguson:And often when you look at what's produced by AI, it's just slightly not on the money, Honestly, what I found is like, man, I well, that's a good generic understanding of that passage, but it's not quite on the money of what my people need to hear or my group needs to hear.
Jeff Iorg:Right.
Kristin Ferguson:So, yeah, I would avoid using it that way for accuracy and for the personal transformation aspect there.
Jeff Iorg:I agree completely. Now you mentioned earlier that there were some principles that we could sort of rest on about best practices or about best use and maybe even some things to avoid. Would you like to talk a bit about a bit about those with us?
Kristin Ferguson:Yeah. I think it's important that we have some guidelines and to understand that there are ethical implications to AI. What is possible is not always ethical, and we really have to understand that. And so, as Christians, as evangelical Christians, we have to understand, first of all, that we're in the image of God, and that is an important guiding principle for how we do things and what our purposes are and what our aims are in the way that we use AI. So the ERLC has come up with some very important principles, and then a resolution that we did a couple of years ago has come up with some very important principles.
Jeff Iorg:Yeah. I wanna mention that. You were mentioning a resolution that was adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2023 on the use of artificial intelligence in ministry context. And you were one of the persons who helped craft that resolution, and I think you were chairman of the resolutions committee for the Southern Baptist Convention. I know you were last year, that has helped craft these.
Jeff Iorg:And so thank you for doing that good work. So we have some ethical information that we can get from our own denomination. We have resolution that is passed by our nomination. These are some things that that that help guide us. So it has it it does have ethical and, moral implication how we use artificial intelligence.
Kristin Ferguson:That's right. And I think, for us at the seminary especially, we sort of are establishing 2 different, aspects of this, 2 principles that are guiding us. The first is the formational or educational intent. What are we trying to get the student to actually learn? What is the skill, the knowledge, the competence that we're trying to get them to achieve?
Kristin Ferguson:And AI cannot replace that. We cannot use AI in a way that substitutes their personal development. Education forms the image of God into Christ likeness. And if AI is shortcutting that, we ought not do it. So for instance, if I, give an assignment that says, I want you to develop this critical thinking on this topic in a form of an essay, then if I ask if the student asked AI to write the essay for them, then clearly we have avoided the entire educational intent.
Kristin Ferguson:But if I say, I want you to develop critical thinking skills on this topic and you the student uses AI as a conversation partner and then reflects on the conversation in ways that were like, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the argumentation developed in this conversation? Well then AI actually helped, the educational and formational intent. The other principle that I like to think of is the authenticity, personal authenticity of the student presenting their own work. That's always been important. We have plagiarism policies for a reason, but it also applies to artificial intelligence.
Kristin Ferguson:If the student presents themselves as having achieved the educational intent, the formational goal of the class, but they had not actually done so because they just used artificial intelligence, then that's a clear violation of the ethics on that.
Jeff Iorg:I think that you've just raised an interesting issue, and that is some people think, well, I'll ask artificial intelligence to do my work for me, and I'll pass it on as my mine or I'll use it as if I created it. The problem with that is it's it's dishonest. It's plagiarism in an academic community. But in a ministry setting, it simply demonstrates a lack of personal engagement that you've just mentioned, a lack of personal transformation, and a, really, a lack of ministerial integrity that's being demonstrated. And because of that, it really undermines or undercuts what's being done.
Jeff Iorg:And some people might be tempted to think, oh, but I'll just mask it enough where people won't know that it really was from artificial intelligence and rather rather than from me. But I would caution you that that is not quite as easy as you think. There's actually a commercial on television right now where a person uses artificial intelligence to rewrite something, And when the recipient reads it, he has a puzzled look on his face like, did this really come from that guy? Because we know each other, and we know how we write and think, and we know how we communicate. And when we receive something like that, that's just really out of character, it's a red flag for us that this is a misuse of artificial intelligence.
Kristin Ferguson:Yeah. Our professors can tell if you all of a sudden become a very precise, excellent, perfectly grammatically correct writer all of a sudden in the middle of the semester.
Jeff Iorg:Yes. And so can our church members who have the same experience when you're up there speaking in a front of a Sunday school class or a sermon. Yes. Alright. Let's wrap it up with this.
Jeff Iorg:I think there are also some inappropriate uses of artificial intelligence that that churches are going to have to help their members really be on guard against and understand how divisive or or destructive they can be. For example, I've recently read, information about people who are creating partners through artificial intelligence where they're they're treating the the the artificially created person, if you will, as if they're real even to the point of having physical relationships or sexual relationships with them. This is simply another more sophisticated form of pornography, frankly, and and it's really going to be damaging, not only to to to people on spiritual, and sexual ways, but also just in their capacity to develop meaningful relationships and move forward in healthy relationships in the so called real world. That that that's one way. Another concern I have is this whole area of using artificial intelligence dishonestly, where we do something that or we generate something and then claim it to be our own.
Jeff Iorg:And if you're doing that at work or you're doing that at school, you're really undermining your integrity and the integrity of your witness for the gospel, where you are. And so in doing those things, I think the church has to again speak up and say, you know, you're violating scripture about honesty and integrity and about telling the truth when you're doing these things even in those contexts. I know back in the day when I was a a younger pastor, I would talk about, you know, at work, well, if you if you cheat on your time card, you know, you're demonstrating dishonesty. Well, no one even knows what that means anymore hardly. But now it's like, well, if you if you if you cheat on your, on your project by having artificial intelligence do it and then passing it off as your own work, That that's a similar kind of thing.
Jeff Iorg:So there's 2 areas where I'm concerned. Are there some other areas where you're concerned that churches are going to have to alert people? Hey. Listen. This is going to lead you to a moral or ethical failure or a moral or ethical compromise that's really gonna undermine your faith.
Kristin Ferguson:I think the 2 you mentioned are really important. I would totally agree with those and warn people against those. I think another one is maybe a little more general. But because AI is just is using this massive dataset and speaking, communicating in a way that's very understandable to people, it might be tempting for our members in our churches to trust AI more than we trust scripture. And and I think that it can be very deceiving that that's actually the source of truth because of how extensive the datasets are and how clear the answers are.
Kristin Ferguson:Sometimes you look at scripture and you're like, then I just wish I had a real distinct answer on something I'm facing right now. But then you go to chat GBT and all of a sudden you've learned a little something about it. And it may be tempting over time that we're conditioned to go to AI as our one source of help and truth instead of the living word of God. And I would just caution us to never replace the word of God for AI, even though it might be easier to access in some ways or, you know, common language responses.
Jeff Iorg:Kristen, that's a fantastic ending for us today. Artificial intelligence is a tool, a human generated tool that is going to augment and assist and also undermine the work that we're attempting to do in ministry leadership. But we must never ever trust it as a source of ultimate truth. We have that already in our hands, the Word of God, the Bible, and everything has to be evaluated by that. Well, I wanna thank doctor Kristen Ferguson for being my guest today on the Lead On podcast.
Jeff Iorg:She's been my friend. I have tried to encourage her and help her to advance her career at a time or 2 in her life. She makes me proud every day with her teaching about how to be effective in the online world of education. And now she's pioneering some good thinking for us in the area of artificial intelligence. So, Kristin, thank you for your friendship.
Jeff Iorg:Thank you for being on the podcast today. And Thank you for your contribution in these areas.
Kristin Ferguson:Thank you so much for having me.
Jeff Iorg:We've been talking about using artificial intelligence. It's an important asset. It can be a productive part of our ministry leadership as we lead on.